Hi Olivier,
I have always loved the concept and sound of drone type synths. I was wondering if you have had any requests for this type of thing. Is the Shruthi-1 capable of this? Or am I dreaming.
Thanks!

But the shruthi on its own is able to produce lovely drones thanks to its powerful modulation matrix. I found out that when trying to produce drones, the important thing is not the number of oscillators but the quality and amount of modulation. On that point, the shruthi is a killer since you can route any lfo, sequence, s&h, noise or whatsoever to anything.
Here are two patches (barely the same actually) I made up in like 5 minutes each using one cem3379 shruthi (which is probably not the best possible filter board for this kind of stuff, compared to a polivoks, a 4PM or the oncoming ms-20+delay filter board).drone 1drone 2
Raw sound, no reverb, no compression or anything of that sort added. I pick the fundamental note using a keyboard, which is very convenient.

The approach is pretty different from a fully analog system like the “monsterdrone” or the “dronelab”. You won’t be able to get a perfectly progressive transition between notes because of discretization ; but you actually have more options to get pulsating, random-like, noisy dronish sounds.

By the way, I got the background hissing to go down by 7dB just by adding cables between arbitrary ground points on the proto, so the noise is definitely a grounding problem that will go away with a proper PCB...

@pichenettes: “By the way, I got the background hissing to go down by 7dB just by adding cables between arbitrary ground points on the proto, so the noise is definitely a grounding problem that will go away with a proper PCB...”

That’s great news – always good to find your initial design can sound even better than you expected ;-)

I certainly did not expect to get as much digital noise – it’s part of the problems of working with breadboard protos… While you can measure many parameters of the design ; but noise and stability are not among them.